Page 137 of Hard to Kill
“Just so we’re clear,” Jimmy says, “what is the message, exactly?”
One last smile.
“Jesus,” the guy says. “Do we have to draw you a picture? We get our peace accord squared away, or the pause button comes off on the killing, and you all go. Her first.”
He stands, drinks up, walks out of the bar without saying another word, or looking back.
Jimmy points at the empty glass sitting there on the bar.
“Bag this,” he says to Kenny Stanton, and then calls Danny Esposito and tells him he’s got some prints he needs to have run.
Then Jimmy calls Paul Harrington.
“I may have a lead on Sonny,” Jimmy says.
ONE HUNDRED NINE
I GO FOR SOMETHING unusual on the weekend:
I go for normal.
I’m still not going anywhere without my gun, I’m not crazy, even taking it into the bathroom with me when I shower. I take it with me when I walk Rip, either on the street or on the beach. I take it with me to the farm stand and the grocery store and Jack’s.
Brigid is safe with her maybe-not-soon-to-be ex, at what she calls an undisclosed location in Maine that she promises to me is far from the line of fire.
Rob Jacobson is still calling a couple of times a day to tell me how bored and stir-crazy he is.
“That’s where I am with my so-called life,” he says. “I might be the only guy in the world to be excited about standing trial for murder again, as long as it gets me out of the house.”
Sam Wylie calls to remind me, as if I need reminding, that my next appointment with her and Dr. Mike Gellis, my oncologist, is scheduled for next Saturday, both of them willing to meet with me on a weekend to accommodate my court schedule. I tell her I’m more likely to forget my birthday than an exciting opportunity like that.
“You know you can drop the tough-guy act with me, right?” she says on the phone.
“What act?”
At least she didn’t call me a bitch after telling me she loved me.
Jimmy continues to investigate Sonny Blum, without much success. The only success he’s had is with the prints Danny Esposito ran for him off the glass the hard case at the bar left. It turns out they’re in the system, and belong to a man named Len Greene, who came up in Blum’s organization around the same time as Bobby Salvatore. His service was interrupted by the four years he spent at Green Haven Correctional.
“Ask me what he was in for,” Jimmy says.
“I’ll bite.”
“Blowing up the car of somebody stealing from Sonny.”
“Was this somebody in the car at the time?”
“He was not.”
“Does Mr. Greene have an address?”
“Yeah. Sonny’s house.”
“Would it help if I suggested letting sleeping Jewish gangsters lie?”
“No,” he says, and ends the call.
His tough-guy act isn’t an act, either. But I already knew that.